Friday Aug 31, 2012

Sociedad Ibérica de Construcciones Eléctricas, S.A.
(SICE) is a Spanish company specializes in engineering and technology integration
for intelligent transport systems and environmental control systems.

They had a large quantity of engineering and environmental planning
documents which they wanted to manage, classify and integrate with their
existing enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system.

SICE adapted Oracle WebCenter Content
to classify and manage more than 30
different types, defined a security plan to ensure the integrity and
recovery of various document types and integrated the document
management solution with SICE’s third-party enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system.

SICE accelerated time to market for all projects, minimized time required to identify and
recover documents and achieved greater efficiency in all operations.

Company Overview

Created in 1921, Sociedad Ibérica de Construcciones Eléctricas, S.A.
(SICE) currently specializes in engineering and technology integration
for intelligent transport systems and environmental control systems. It
has more than 2,500 employees, with operations in Spain and various
locations in Latin America, the United States, Africa, and Australia.

Business Challenges

They had a large quantity of engineering and environmental planning
documents generated in research and projects which they wanted to manage, classify and integrate with their
existing enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system.

Solution Deployed

SICE worked with the Oracle Partner ABAST Solutions to evaluate and
choose the best document management system, ultimately selecting Oracle WebCenter Content over other options including Documentum,
SharePoint, OpenText, and Alfresco.They adapted Oracle WebCenter Content to classify and manage more than 30
different types, defined a security plan to ensure the integrity and recovery of various document types and integrated the document management solution with SICE’s third-party enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system to accelerate incorporation with the
documentation system and ensure integrity ERP system data.

Business Results

SICE accelerated time to market for all projects by releasing reports
and information that support and validate engineering projects, stored all documents in a single repository with
organizationwide accessibility, minimizing time required to identify and
recover documents needed for reports to initiate and execute
engineering and building projects. Overall they achieved greater efficiency in all operations, including
technical and impact report development and construction documentation
management.

“The correct and efficient management of information is vital to our
environmental management activity. Oracle WebCenter Content
serves as a basis for knowledge management practices, with the objective
of adding greater value to everything that we do.”

This report supports the point of Oracle’s Social Business Strategy to seamless integrate social capabilities into the main business processes.

Quote from report:

“Oracle has adopted the correct approach to creating a social layer and socially enabled applications. Oracle Social Network is not simply another enterprise social network product; it is a complete social layer for the enterprise application stack. This approach will serve Oracle users well in the future.”

OSN allow to capture the related Conversations of a business process right where it’s happens – within the respective Business application.

Fusion CRM is an excellent example for this approach.

Quote from report:

“Oracle’s new software, Oracle Social Network, is an example of a solution to the silo problem. While Oracle fields a typical enterprise social network application with microblogging, file sharing, shared documents or wikis, and activity streams, the front-end application is only a small part of what Oracle Social Network does. Instead, Oracle Social Network is a platform that provides social features as a service to other enterprise applications. In effect, Oracle Social Network socially enables all of Oracle’s enterprise applications—all enterprise applications really—with not only the same features, but also the same conversations. As a result, the social conversations act as a conduit for inter-application communication and collaboration.”

Indecopi Optimizes Patent Approval Management and Accelerates Customer Service Times by 40%

Indecopi is a decentralized public agency that promotes the country’s markets and
protects consumer rights. It promotes fair and honest competition and
safeguards all forms of intellectual property through three
directorates: Author’s Rights, Inventions and New Technologies, and
Trademarks.

The business challenge was to unify the agency’s technology infrastructure to create a business process management strategy, consolidate the
organization’s Web platform and improve and automate
information services for citizens and businesses, and streamline patent
procedures by digitizing documentation.

Indecopi optimized patent information services , organized
information, provided around-the-clock online access to users, and developed a Web site that
provides internal and external users access to DIN information, such as
patent documentation, through a user-friendly interface.

Indecopi achieved impressive business result by reducing use of paper files by 50%, accelerating transaction approvals, reduce nonvalue-added activities by 85% and accelerated customer service times by 40%.

Company OverviewPeru’s Instituto Nacional de Defensa de la Competencia y de la Protección de la Propiedad Intelectual (Indecopi), the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and Protection of Intellectual Property, is a decentralized public agency that promotes the country’s markets and protects consumer rights. It promotes fair and honest competition and safeguards all forms of intellectual property through three directorates: Author’s Rights, Inventions and New Technologies, and Trademarks.

Business ChallengesIndecopi's challenge was to unify the agency’s technology infrastructure to create a business process management strategy, starting with the Directorate of Inventions and New Technologies (DIN), consolidate the organization’s Web platform to meet new demands for software and process development, such as for patent applications, and improve and automate information services for citizens and businesses and streamline patent procedures by digitizing documentation.

Solution DeployedIndecopi optimized patent information services with Oracle Business Process Management, automating processes to deliver expedient searches, and to create new services, such as alerts to users. They organized information and provided around-the-clock online access to users with Oracle WebCenter Content. In addition they used Oracle WebLogic Server to develop a Web site that provides internal and external users access to DIN information, such as patent documentation, through a user-friendly interface.

Accelerated customer service times by 40% by optimizing procedures, such as searches and online information related to granting patents

“Oracle Business Process Manager has been a paradigm shift in process management. By digitalizing and automating our patents information services, we can now manage everything in the simplest way possible, expanding our options for the creation of new services.”

Wednesday Aug 29, 2012

Sberbank of Russia is the largest credit institution in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), accounting for 27% of Russian banking assets and 26% of Russian banking capital.

Sberbank of Russia needed to increase business efficiency and employee productivity due to the growth in its corporate clientele from 1.2 million to an estimated 1.6 million.

Sberbank of Russia deployed Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications to create a single client view, optimize client communication, improve efficiency, and automate distressed asset processing. Based on Oracle WebCenter Content, they implemented an enterprise content management system for documents, unstructured content storage and search, which became an indispensable service across the organization and in the board room business results.

Sberbank of Russia consolidated borrower information across the entire organization into a single repository to obtain, for the first time, a single view on the bank’s borrowers. With the implemented solution they reducing the amount of bad debt significantly.

Company OverviewSberbank of Russia is the largest credit institution in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), accounting for 27% of Russian banking assets and 26% of Russian banking capital. In 2010, it ranked 43rd in the world for Tier 1 capital.

Business ChallengesSberbank of Russia needed to increase business efficiency and employee productivity due to the growth in its corporate clientele from 1.2 million to an estimated 1.6 million. It also wanted to automate distressed asset management to reduce the number of corporate clients’ bad debts. As part of their business strategy they wanted to drive high-quality, competitive customer services by simplifying client communication processes and enabling personnel to quickly access client information

Solution deployedSberbank of Russia deployed Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications to create a single client view, optimize client communication, improve efficiency, and automate distressed asset processing.
Based on Oracle WebCenter Content, they implemented an enterprise content management system for documents, unstructured content storage and search which became an indispensable service across the organization and in the board room business results.

Business ResultsSberbank of Russia consolidated borrower information across the entire organization into a single repository to obtain, for the first time, a single view on the bank’s borrowers.
They monitored 103,000 client transactions and 32,000 bank cards with credit collection issues (100% of Sberbank’s bad borrowers) reducing the amount of bad debt significantly.

“Innovation and client service are
the foundation of our business strategy. Oracle’s Siebel CRM applications
helped advance our objectives by enabling us to deliver faster, more
personalized service while managing and tracking distressed assets.”

A.B. Sokolov,
Head of Center of Business Administration and Customer Relationship Management,
Sberbank of Russia

Missed Oracle’s Customer Experience Online Forum? Don’t worry. You can still catch the sessions at your convenience. Watch the Customer Experience Online Forum on demand to hear from Bruce Tempkin, a leading expert in customer experience, as well as other thought leaders and they delve into topics such as the ROI of customer experience and strategies for winning over customers. Simply register to gain access to these sessions and more:

The Customer Experience RevolutionCustomer experience has become the most important and defensible differentiator for your business. The customer experience is a journey that transcends all customer touchpoints and stages of the customer lifecycle. Discover where you are in the journey, identify how to begin optimizing the experience you deliver your customers, and join the Revolution.

The ROI of Customer ExperienceBruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner, Temkin GroupResearch of US and UK customers demonstrates a high correlation between a positive customer experience and loyalty. A successful customer interaction increases the willingness to buy more and to recommend your company. US companies can gain $380 million over three years by providing an optimized customer experience. This session will help companies determine the business impact that customer experience has on their specific business.

Integrating Marketing and Loyalty to Deliver Great Customer ExperiencesNew devices and channels, such as mobile, social and web, are creating radical shifts in the customer buying process and the ways your company can reach and communicate with existing and potential customers. Learn how leading brands are using Oracle's marketing solutions to harness big data and better understand their customers, extend their marketing reach into social channels, and retain their high value customers through more rewarding customer experience.

Where to Start Your Organization's RevolutionThe process of crafting a great customer experience starts with understanding customers and their goals. This session helps you to begin mapping a sound customer experience strategy, describing the intended experience and kinds of processes that create differentiation.

The ROI of Customer Experience: A Tempkin Group Insight Report

Did you know that customer experience leaders have more than a 16 percentage point advantage over customer experience laggards in consumers’ willingness to buy more, their reluctance to switch business away, and their likelihood to recommend? Did you know that even a modest increase in customer experience can translate into millions of dollars gained? Learn more about the ROI of customer experience in this free report.

Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications.

Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance.

Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution.

Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace.

Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy.

Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.

Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste

Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies". There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience. There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used. With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler. But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team. In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum.

Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes. Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time.

Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A: The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues; and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business. It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project.

If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!

Monday Aug 27, 2012

Are you ready for 2015? According to IDC, 2015 is the year when more users are projected to access the internet using mobile devices than with PC’s or other wired devices. It’s no doubt that mobile devices are a critical means of communication today, and are on track to become increasingly more important in the coming years. However, device formats are so varied that delivering a mobile web experience that will engage site visitors and enhance your brand can be a daunting task. Solutions that empower organizations to easily extend their web presence to the mobile channel, while saving significant time and effort in managing mobile sites, are now essential in our ever connected mobile world. So what are some of the things organizations should look for in such a solution?

Mobile device form factors, networks, protocols, and browsers vary widely, and reformatting web content for thousands of different device and software combinations is a prohibitive task. An effective mobile solution can make this process seamless by automatically formatting designated web content for mobile delivery. By automatically detecting a site visitor’s device configuration, the selected web content can be sized and formatted for optimal display on that particular device. This can save tremendous time involved in building, formatting, and maintaining individual websites or mobile applications for different mobile devices.

It’s not enough to simply support the thousands of different mobile device types that are out there. It’s also critical to make it easy for marketers and other business users to manage mobile sites and mobile content. Those responsible for maintaining an organization’s web and mobile experiences need the ability to edit content using rich text editor tools and then preview that content directly in the context of the mobile website and the traditional website, ideally from the same business user interface. Powerful capabilities such as these make managing the web experience for mobile devices easy, even with frequently changing content, across a multitude of different devices. This saves tremendous time involved in building, formatting, and maintaining individual websites or mobile applications for different mobile devices. When content or business needs change, the business user needs only to change site content once, and it is seamlessly deployed to the web and all mobile channels.

Geo-location is another critical input to making the online experience engaging and relevant for web visitors who are increasingly mobile. A mobile solution should enable use of device GPS data to deliver location-based content and services to mobile website visitors. Organizations can provide mobile site visitors with location-sensitive search results, location-based offers and recommendations, integration of maps and directions into site content, and much more – all critical for meeting the needs of those on the go.

To hear more about how mobile is changing the game, check out our recent webcast with Ted Schadler, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester, where he discussed why mobile is the new face of engagement, or learn more about how to extend your web presence to the mobile channel with Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Mobility Server.

Friday Aug 24, 2012

The Organization of American States (OAS) brings together all 35 independent states of the Americas and is the primary political, judicial, and social government forum in the Western Hemisphere.

OAS' mission focuses on human rights advocacy, which is carried out via the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The objective of the project was to manage more efficiently large volume of documentation to accelerate the petition process while reducing the security risks associated with routing paper-based petition files for internal reviews.

OAS gained the ability to efficiently and securely manage 1,500 new human rights petitions each year as well as 8,000 ongoing petitions,improving traceability and visibility, as well as accelerating petition processes.

OAS received international recognition for the implementation, including being named a 2011 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate, and the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) 2011 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award.

Company OverviewThe Organization of American States (OAS) is the world’s oldest regional organization, dating back to the First International Conference of American States, held in Washington, D.C., October 1889 to April 1890. It brings together all 35 independent states of the Americas and is the primary political, judicial, and social government forum in the Western Hemisphere. OAS works to achieve peace and justice among member states, promote their solidarity, strengthen collaboration, and defend state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence. Five main pillars––democracy, human rights, security, internal development, and Inter-American cooperation––form the foundation of its work.

Business ChallengesAn important part of OAS’ mission focuses on human rights advocacy, which is carried out via the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The commission receives more than 1,500 petitions every year and handle, at any given time, a docket of more than 8,000 cases. These complex cases often involve boxes of documentation, which IACHR routed manually throughout the organization.

The objective of the project was to manage more efficiently large volume of documentation to accelerate the petition process while reducing the security risks associated with routing paper-based petition files for internal reviews.

Solution Deployed
OAS deployed Oracle WebCenter Content for IACHR to automate and expedite petition and case processing. Since that time, it has improved processing efficiency, extended visibility into petition status, and increased security around critical documents. After achieving a significant return on investment in the early stages of deployment, OAS began plans to extend the implementation to enable petitioners and other stakeholders to track cases and access critical documentation online.

Business Results

Gained the ability to efficiently and securely manage 1,500 new human rights petitions each year as well as 8,000 ongoing petitions―many containing a significant amount of unstructured data

Replaced IACHR’s paper-based environment with digitized documents and automated workflows, improving traceability and visibility, as well as accelerating petition processes

Accommodated a very complex environment that encompasses more than 17 custom workflows in four languages―Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French―and more than 100 workflow security rules based on geography, stakeholder conflict of interest and more

Increased IACHR data storage capacity by 206%, from 30,260 to 62,208 documents, in the first four months of operation, and captured more than 150,000 documents by December 2011

Received international recognition for the implementation, including being named a 2011 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate in recognition of the IT project’s potential to support positive social change, and the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) 2011 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the midsize organization category

“We needed to efficiently capture, secure, and distribute digital and paper-based documents throughout the lifecycle of thousands of human rights cases, and only Oracle WebCenter Content could meet our complex workflow requirements. We’ve turned petition documents into intellectual assets, improved collaboration and security, and achieved an impressive return on investment.”

Juan José Goldschtein, Chief Information Officer, Organization of American States

Thursday Aug 23, 2012

Douglas County School District is located in Castle Rock, CO and educates more than 61,000 students. It includes 80 schools and employs more than 6,000 people.

They had a lot of duplicate website content and a cumbersome and time consuming process to update their content.

Using Oracle WebCenter Content, Douglas County School District implemented a centralized document and web content management and publishing system which allowing users to refer to one single source of content.

They eliminated old and duplicative content, reducing the number of web site pages from approximately 3,000 to 650 while enabling content authors to do their own web content publishing and empowering employees to make more timely updates while enhancing communitywide online interaction.

Company OverviewDouglas County School District is located in Castle Rock, CO and educates more than 61,000 students. It includes 80 schools and employs more than 6,000 people.

Business Challenges

The school district’s department-level subject matter experts had to go through a cumbersome, time consuming process to update web site content. The district also had a lot of duplicative web site content, leading to inaccuracies when information was not updated across all instances on the site. It also lacked a method for allowing parents, students, employees, and community members to provide their feedback on the web site.

Douglas County School District analyzed the situation and defined following objectives:

Streamline the process for updating school district web site content to minimize bottlenecks and delays

Unify content to eliminate duplicative documents and instances of erroneous, outdated information on the school district’s Web site

Enhance community engagement by enabling parents, students, employees, and community members to provide their feedback and comments on the district web site

Enable users to update their own content

Solution DeployedDouglas County School District worked with the Oracle Partner Redstone Content Solutions, LLC and implemented a centralized document and web content management system based on Oracle WebCenter Content . They developed a new district web site which allowing district users to refer to one single source of content. The solution enables content authors to do their own web content publishing, empowering employees to make more timely updates and freeing IT staff time to focus more on development and new programs. As part of the solution they leverage online forms and workflow in Oracle WebCenter Content to greatly reduce the many paper forms that exist in the district.

Business ResultsDouglas County School District achieved impressive business results. They eliminated old and duplicative content, reducing the number of web site pages from approximately 3,000 to 650 while enabling content authors to do their own Web content publishing, empowering school district employees to make more timely updates and freeing IT staff time to focus more on development and new programs. The solution enables parents, students, employees, and community members to more easily find information and to provide online feedback.

"With Oracle WebCenter Content, we were able to unify document and Web content management, eliminate duplicative and erroneous information on the Web site, allow our employees to make their own content updates, and enhance communitywide interaction.”

Dwight Humphrey, Executive Director of IT, Douglas County School District Partner Name for Oracle.com Search – Redstone Content Solutions, LLC

Wednesday Aug 22, 2012

Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

Date: 8/23/12Time: 10:00 a.m. PT/ 1:00 p.m. ET

Qualcomm is the world leader in next generation mobile technologies. Its ideas and inventions are driving wireless growth and helping to connect people to information, entertainment and one another. In order to provide a seamless Web experience for its customers, Qualcomm teamed with Oracle Partner Keste to deliver an integrated self-service portal that provides a single view of all processes. Attend this webcast and hear how Oracle WebCenter has allowed Qualcomm to increase customer satisfaction, speed customer on-boarding and improve ROI by delivering a rich, personalized and interactive experience to its end users.

ArRiyadh Development Authority (ADA) Government agency is responsible for the development of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital city with a population of nearly 7 million citizens.

Using Oracle WebCenter Content - ADA implemented a centralized enterprise content management system which serves as a complete, secure and compliant repository of digitized urban planning data. The repository stores over 300,000 high-resolution images, more than 1,000 high-definition videos and has a size of over 25 Terra Byte.

ADA deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to deliver a single source of truth for all city and regional projects, streamlining business processes and ensuring rapid access to information.

Company OverviewArRiyadh Development Authority (ADA) is responsible for the socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental development of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital city, which is the largest city in Saudi Arabia and the urban center of a region with a population of nearly 7 million citizens. The city is divided into 15 municipal districts, all managed by Riyadh Municipality, which is led by the mayor of Riyadh and ADA. ADA devises plans and procedures to improve the standard of services and facilities provided for Riyadh’s residents.

Business Challenges

ADA had following business requirements:

Create a centralized enterprise content management system to serve as a complete repository of digitized data and documents for urban planning and development, making data transparent and accessible to authorized departments across ADA and facilitating standardized business process management

Increase transparency and efficiency in planning and scheduling of all urban projects to improve organizational productivity and enable senior management to view up-to-date project status information

Reduce error rates of manual data management processes

Enable transparent, secure, and centralized control of more than 25 terabytes of urban development data, including multimedia, drawings, and reports, currently expanding by 20% each year

Solution deployed

ADA deployed Oracle WebCenter Content to house unstructured content accessible to users in recognizable formats and within the context of ADA’s familiar applications and working practices and Oracle WebCenter Portal to deliver a single source of truth for all city and regional projects, streamlining business processes and ensuring rapid access to information. As part of the solution ADA implemented a digital signature technology and initiated digitization of a backlog of physical paper files in various sizes to ultimately create an online, widely accessible archive managed through a central repository.

Using a centralized digital asset management (DAM), ADA handles now a photography and video library that includes more than 300,000 high-resolution images and more than 1,000 high-definition videos.

The development teams can now quickly identify web site content for arriyadh.com and ada.gov.sa in the central repository and publish it seamlessly using sophisticated content management tools, instead of searching for unstructured data on personal desktops and in paper documents.

ADA appointed a local Oracle Partner Advanced Operations Technology to facilitate a smooth rollout of all Oracle technology to more than 400 end users across the ADA enterprise.

Business ResultsWith the deployed solution ADA achieved following business results:

Ensured end-to-end content lifecycle management of all ADA data and digital documents from creation to archive

Enabled ADA to maintain consistent policies and services regarding system and content back-up and recovery, document retention, security, and system maintenance

Improved consistency and audit-ability while ensuring compliance with ADA’s existing business policies and government regulations, ultimately safe-guarding content as well as ADA’s reputation

“Since deploying Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Suite, we have seen rapid improvements in our ability to manage data and documents effortlessly and ensure the smooth daily operations of urban planning. At the same time, we have empowered each department to manage and report on projects with a high level of transparency.”

Monday Aug 20, 2012

American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. (AHMSI) is a 3,000 employee company based in Coppell, Texas and provides services to homeowners and loan investors. With a multibillion portfolio under management, AHMSI is one of the country's largest servicers of Alt-A and subprime loans.

AHMSI implemented a public-facing secure Web portal using Oracle WebCenter Suite to help investors make informed decisions more quickly and automated much of the investor approval process

AHMSI reduced the time needed to process loan modification from approximately 30 days to one week. Using Oracle WebCenter Content AHMSI can now share strategic & sensitive content in compliance with the various governance regulations.

Company OverviewAmerican Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. provides services to homeowners and loan investors. Whether a borrower holds a traditional, Alt-A, payment option, or subprime loan, the company's highly trained experts are committed to providing high levels of service as they work to address each customer's needs. AHMSI also carefully manages the loan portfolios of investors. With a multibillion portfolio under management, AHMSI is one of the country's largest servicers of Alt-A and subprime loans.

Challenges

AHMSI’s biggest challenge was to improve security by minimizing the use of e-mail and FTP sites to share sensitive mortgage loan data with third parties, including estate investors.

Solutions
AHMSI implemented Oracle WebCenter Suite to deploy a public-facing Web portal, enabling authorized external users to view content stored on the content server and Oracle WebCenter Content to create a secure storage area for daily, weekly, and monthly reports. They leveraged the standard group spaces in Oracle WebCenter Portal to enable business users to collaborate more effectively.

Results
By automating much of the investor approval process, they reduced the time needed to process loan modifications from approximately 30 days to one week and greatly minimized the use of e-mail and FTP sites to share information. Investors can now view supporting materials including real-time loan information and call center data to help them make more informed decisions more quickly. The implemented solution complies with various government regulations in dealings with real estate investors.

“To maintain our commitment to providing customers with the highest possible levels of services while creating a competitive advantage for our business, we needed to be able to share strategic and sensitive content in a safe and secure manner. With Oracle WebCenter, we have a flexible and modern user experience platform that allows us to securely, reliably and efficiently manage our portfolio of sensitive data and share it with our business partners. This not only helps ensure compliance with various government regulations, it accelerates processes and supports more informed decision making.”

Wednesday Aug 15, 2012

We're happy to announce the next webcast in our Oracle WebCenter in Action Customer and Partner Webcast Series! Be sure to join us next Thursday for an overview of Qualcomm's self-service portal and a live demo!

Qualcomm
Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle
WebCenter

Qualcomm is the world leader in next generation mobile
technologies. Its ideas and inventions are driving wireless growth and helping
to connect people to information, entertainment and one another. In order to
provide a seamless Web experience for its customers, Qualcomm teamed with Oracle
Partner Keste to deliver an integrated self-service portal that provides a
single view of all processes.

Attend this webcast and hear how Oracle
WebCenter has allowed Qualcomm to:

Monday Aug 13, 2012

Upgrading Your Approach to Social Collaboration
Success

Engulfed in a sea of buzzwords and new technologies, it is
easy to loose sight of the core goals that social collaboration tools
support.The "cool" factor of
these tools is undeniable, which can actually complicate our ability to zero in
on making deployments objectively successful.

Further adding to our challenges, our projects do not exist
within a vacuum and are influenced by resource constraints, organizational
politics and depth of strategic knowledge within our organization and partner
teams.

Seeing as how these factors may not change, how can we close
the gap on success with socially collaborative deployments?Wouldn't it be great if we had a few tools to
guide our decision making in and around social collaboration technologies?

We inherently approach and judge projects with our own
perspective - our "Lens" into the world of social collaboration.If we can enrich our lens to become conscious
of new senses for measuring aspects of social collaboration - like Friction and
Subtraction, we are better able to critically evaluate our projects.

In Six Counterintuitive Best Practices for Social
Collaboration, we introduce with 6 new vantage points to help enable success
with your projects.Our session omits
buzzwords and discusses objective findings, experience, anecdotes - even daring
to suggest you should “Throw Out Your Intranet Home Page” and why.

To prime ourselves for this week's webcast, let's consider
the following as we start down a path of upgrading our lens onto social
collaboration

Social Collaboration is a Spice - Not the Main Dish

Just as a spice, social collaboration enriches a solution,
but does not in and of itself offer the complete solution.We would never eat a tablespoon of cinnamon
by itself, but it can make a high value food like oatmeal much more accessible
to people interested in having it for breakfast.

Consider the efforts placed into a new marketing initiative.Social collaboration capabilities can enable
participants involved with the new marketing campaign to share in a seamless,
collective dialogue and exchange materials related to the initiative. This ultimately
offers an accessible means for people to more naturally work around the marking
initiative entity that would otherwise span a variety of traditional systems
like email, document management and discussion forums.

When thinking about where social collaboration can
"spice" up existing process in a line of business, look for the
following or similar key words within the process "coordinate, resolve,
facilitate, discuss, determine" to gauge the level of applicability.

As Mike Fauscette from IDC pointed out on Monday, many
organizations undertake social business initiatives as a grass roots effort,
namely because they occur in a place that will make a difference.Social collaboration applied to a problem -
because it objectively helps, not just for the sake of using social
collaboration, is where the technology shines.

Cataloging process challenges within a given line of
business is an excellent starting point for understanding if and where social
collaboration can add value.

Become Aware of Social Ergonomics

Perhaps your organization already has social collaboration
tools targeted toward a business process like the one highlighted above, but
adoption is slow at best. How are your Social Ergonomics?

Software packages are constantly striving to deliver
innovation through a myriad of features and functions.If the features and functions are on target
with the business needs - what could possibly hinder adoption?

Let's consider our physical world for a moment.What if throughout the course of your work
day you needed to correlate information from sources that resided in various
buildings in your office space and within each building a ladder was required
to access boxes containing the information you required to complete your
tasks?In the physical world we
instantly rationalize that this does not make sense.We would demand that it be rearranged, as it
drastically hinders our ability to work within the environment.

Unfortunately, it is often difficult to recognize where
hurdles in our virtual world exist and they often go unrecognized.After all, our organization implemented
social collaboration tools, right?

To better understand this critical, but difficult to
understand disconnect, let's examine the opposite end of the social ergonomic
spectrum.Which systems can we use as
examples of excellent social ergonomics?They are the ones that people flock to using - because they are easy and
add value to the process that they are supporting.They are not social collaboration for the
sake of social collaboration.

If a system has excellent social ergonomics, the technology
becomes transparent to the end user.

Getting Your Social Collaboration Critical Tools

Through a series of atypical subject matter, anecdotes and
statistics in Six Counterintuitive Best Practices for Social Collaboration, you
will become equipped with new tools to critically evaluate and shape your
social collaboration experiences to get the most value from your investment.

I look forward to sharing and receiving questions and
comments and hope to see you on the webcast.

Looking to implement social and collaboration technologies in
your workplace? Sometimes the best tips are the not so obvious ones. Join John
Brunswick as he analyzes a series of counterintuitive ways to help
increase the return on your social collaboration investments by sharing a
series of best practices that may seem counterintuitive. Reviewing
practices like "Why Five Users are Better than Five Hundred" and
"Throw out your Intranet Home Page", will help shed light on some
common misconceptions around how and where intranets and collaboration provide
value, to help organizations to grow, manage these systems and ultimately
maximize return on their efforts.

John Brunswick is a WebCenter Solution Consultant at Oracle Corporation, specializing in enterprise portal and content management solutions. Prior to this he was a Consulting Practice Manager within BEA System’sBusiness Interaction Division Professional Services Group. He managed their Enterprise Portal and Business Process Management practices in Canada and New England, helping Fortune 500 companies create solutions to a wide range of business challenges.

He actively contributes to the enterprise software business community and has authored a series of articlesabout optimal business involvement in portal, business process management and SOA development, examining ways of helping organizations move away from monolithic application development. Brunswick served as an affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Centerin 2009, focusing on educational Web strategies.

In 2006, he developed ServiceMountain, a commercial software package to help manage small service businesses, which was acquired by a medium-sized software vendor.

John actively leads the Boston Computing Reviewuser group which he founded in 2005, educating members about emerging technologies and industry trends. Prior to working at BEA Systems John was an Implementation Manager at Plumtree Software. Before working at Plumtree Software, John directed Jniche Technology Associates, a small web application development and networking group. John graduated from Boston University with a degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Management Information Systems, is a PMPand holds various technical certification credentials.

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